Mah stoopid, it burns! It should be obvious, I guess, why approximately one gob of climatologists would fudge their data at the direction of a plethora of government leaders in a harmony that would make the London Philharmonic envious. But I’ve always been a little slow on the uptake so I’m not really getting the whole “why” of that effort and sellout of the scientific method.
My (ok, really, really brief and shallow) internet research suggests the motive is for the scientists to get more funding–basically, to cry wolf so someone will give them better wolf-monitoring gear. Also, so governments can control their people (to make them do what nefarious thing they would not otherwise want to do?) in the absence of a Cold War. But this can’t really be the crux of it, can it?
Why this hoax? I want to understand the deniers’ mindset as they have expressed it. Not necessarily in terms of “I wanna seem important despite knowing nothing” or some other pat psychological diagnosis made without first obtaining someone’s full medical history. What are the motives given?
Yeah, I don’t get it, either. When you ask 'em (the deniers), they usually respond with something vague about how the researchers won’t get any more grant money if they don’t toe the climate change line. This, of course, ignores a few facts:
Climatologists don’t just study anthropogenic climate change- they study the climate. Even if climate change were to be completely disproved tomorrow, they’d still have a ton of work ahead of them. They study the climate, not just how humans effect it.
Any climatologist who could disprove AGW would be world-famous. He’d be able to retire to his own private island.
There’s nowhere near as much money in proving AGW to be true as there is in proving it to be false. Hell, much of our economy is predicated upon keeping the oil flowing and burning as much of it as possible.
And, as you’ve pointed out, if AGW were some sort of conspiracy, it would be the biggest scam in the history of the world. Nations worldwide, coordinating with thousands of scientists and researchers worldwide, and we’re supposed to believe that not *one *of them has come forward to admit it’s all a scheme?
Why would the government even want to put any limits on energy consumption if it weren’t for climate change? Most of the time governments want us to consume more, not less, because that sort of helps the economy along.
The arguments I’ve seen never seem to get any further than “Follow the money!”. I’ve never seen any of them that explain how there’s supposed to be more money in acknowledging climate change, you’re just supposed to “follow it” yourself, and if you ask for an explanation, you’re accused of being “sheeple” (what’s the singular of that, anyway, a “sherson”?).
EDIT: I think you’re trying to find reason where there isn’t any. Just because someone holds a belief, doesn’t mean that there’s a rational reason for it.
I unaccept! You are suggesting the deniers are essentially saying, “Hey kid, wanna get in my van?” without even using some kind of candy as a lure. Surely there is some promised candy or a trip to Pleasure Island for joining in the denial?
All the things which scientists say are causing climate change are the result of actions of some very large, powerful, rich companies. The things the scientists say need to be done to try to fix the supposed climate change will need to be done by a different set of very large companies, often to the detriment of the first set of companies. For example, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, which would be bad for the oil & gas industries, and start using green energy technologies, which would be great for the solar/wind/geothermal/etc. industries.
So, the big hoax of climate change is just a way for all these ne’er-do-well startup companies to claw their way into a position of power, authority & wealth that they don’t deserve.
For anyone who claims there is a conspiracy of scientists: have you ever been to a meeting of actual scientists or other academics? Have you ever tried to get them to agree on anything? The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind.
Scientists compete for funding. That’s what grant writing, which is a large chunk of what actual scientists spend their working time doing, is all about. Scientists compete for jobs (at least, I know that astronomers and physicists do, I would imagine it’s similar for climatologists). It’s hard to get people who are competing for funding and jobs to work together in a conspiracy. They do work in teams, but the more people you are trying to get to work together in your conspiracy, the harder it is going to be. I suspect the difficulty scales as at least n[sup]2[/sup], if not more steeply.
But creating a large-scale conspiracy has got to be expensive. Where are these companies that don’t yet have all that wealth getting the money to do it? Don’t say “the government”- money talks in our system of government, I don’t think anyone can dispute that. The established companies can and do contribute to political campaigns, and they have more money to do so than the upstarts, so the government should be on their side.
So naturally, the big governments of the world are abandoning the powerful lobbies of the oil and gas industries and the multimillions they contribute to get behind all the new green startups.
Interesting how it is now called “climate change” and a few years it was “global warming”. Back in the 1970s it was “New Ice Age”. Of course this is brought to us by people like Al Gore and Tom Friedman, who generate plenty of carbon emissions in their life but want to force you to use less.
The big reason is that the world governments will shortly decide to trade “Carbon Credits” as a (alleged) means to control CO2 emissions. So countries will be allotted a certain amount of fossil fuel consumption (based upon so many millions tons of CO2/year). These would be sold to developed nations, so that their limits could be exceeded.
The whole process of deciding who gets what allocation, and for how much, will make the process costly and open to corruption. It will make billionaires of those who get the licenses to trade them.
Well, we are frequently informed of the great economic benefits to getting on board with solar and other renewable energy sources and that phasing out of oil and coal will add lots of jobs.
So maybe it’s the alternative energy people and their stooges who are hoaxing in order to profit big time. :eek:
So there’s that- which is, of course, neither here nor there, because it really don’t have anything to do with how AGW is supposed to be some sort of worldwide hoax.
This is because, although global average temperatures are going up, that doesn’t necessarily mean that average temperatures everywhere at every time of year will go up. If you call it “global warming”, you have to contend with idiots claiming that a cold winter in one place refutes it. If you have to deal with idiots in your line of work, the kind of idiots who are always asking the same questions or making the same comments, you know that this gets tiresome after a while.
Actually, back in the 1970s, it was still “global warming”. There were a few who were predicting a new ice age, but they were a small minority, who for some reason got a disproportionate amount of press.
“Climate Change deniers” generally adopt the “conspiracy theory” mantra and claim that climate change - which is global warming, with the necessary alias to explain a large number of “non-heat” climate anomalies - is the current mantra of the “leftist elite” in the scientific community. The claim, with some justification, is that anyone who challenges the CC orthodoxy is dismissed as a nut and ostracized by the scientific hierarchy that distributes research money. Whether this is anything other than the orthodox view laughing at the dissenters is an interesting debate. Of course, those on the receiving end include the chronically contrary types who see the hand of big brother directing everything.
The trouble is that with statistics, numbers can be tortured to tell you what you want to hear. Temperature readings from locations that used to be rural and now are in urban heat islands may or may not need to be adjusted - and by how much? How accurate were previous readings?
When does erratic become a trend? What is cycle and what is trend? The climate is erratic, the last few years have been colder than normal in some parts (hot in others), and nobody can do experiments with global weather other than the one were all doing right now… plus, the sunspot cycle may or may not be tied to climate (it coincided with some serious ups and downs in global climate in history) and this cycle is much lower intensity than the last 100 years of warm weather…
The only sure thing is that messing with the global atmosphere is probably not a safe thing. We knew how to deal with what we had, and we don’t know for sure what’s coming next.
Speaking of “follow the money,” it occurs to me that those self-same companies benefit greatly from the deniers’ hoax mindset, and possess the resources to both initiate and continue or maintain such a conspiracy. Thus, I propose that the climate change denial is ITSELF a conspiracy by the Illuminati against the sheeple, except that in this case, the sheeple are the idiots who think “science” is a naughty, filthy, dirty word.